A startup thriving to be a fundamental mentor in education

Fundamentor teaches kids through games

In an era where everything else is fun but education, Fundamentor uses gamification for cognitive aptitude development in school and college students. Cognitive aptitude is referred to under various nomenclature:

Problem-solving skills

Higher-order thinking skills (HOTS),

Critical thinking skills,

Creativity and Communication skills.

Animated concept videos

A stereotypical academic syllabus generally ignores these skills. Fundamentor is an online platform that combines engaging content with gamification, and analytics to develop cognitive aptitude. The program is offered to school students, college students, teachers, and entry-level corporate employees.

It started its commercial deployment in July 2015, currently has 3000 paid subscribers and claim to have $27,000 in revenues.

The gamification of the product is what that made everything work out fun and fine.

Concept games

The content is grade/class specific and consists of various topics of Math, English, Logical reasoning, and Creative thinking. A one term product consists of 56 daily missions with each mission opening a new topic.

Before the missions commence, an initial aptitude test called QVIC is taken to determine a baseline score. A daily mission consists of 3 short quizzes on a new topic, animated funda videos, and concept games. Completed missions remain open in history for score improvement attempts. The short quizzes are adaptive to learning requirements of all spectrum of students. The students get encouragement in the form of points, badges, star ratings and leaderboard position.

Daily Missions

The points can be redeemed for material gifts and next term’s subscription. The students, parents, and schools get access to comparative analysis through respective login ids. The subscription price ranges from INR 100 to INR 1800 and can be monthly, quarterly or annually. Humanity has been scooped as the firm acknowledges economically incapable students and help them out with a discounted prices.

The core team consists of Amol Patkar(Director- Sales), Bhargavi AR(Director- Product) and Ankur Vohra(Director- Content and Strategy) Amit Vashisht: (Director:Technology). All of them are engineering classmates and have known each other for 20 years. Everything is internally funded and a lookout for fresh funds in about 6 months for scalability.

L to R – Ankur Vohra, Bhargavi AR, Amol Patkar

Fundamentor mobile app will be launched during 3 rd quarter of 2016. With a vision to reach 1Mn subscriber base by 2020 Fundamentor wishes to expand its geographical boundaries to the US, UAE and a few African countries starting in 2017.

Startups generally celebrate every small reason, But if the reason is about a milestone achievement then it makes a big difference. This victorious path is not an easier one and we have faced and surpassed many challenges in the last few months to meet our target of half a million visitors. While our ambition is a much bigger number, the target we achieved was planned towards the end of the financial year and our team made it possible 4 months in advance.

Indeed a great effort by Shishir Kumar and the entire team and a special thanks to the avid readers of IndianCEO for following us. IndianCEO is indeed my first bet in to media business and believe me this is just the beginning. Early next year we have some great product announcements and our next milestone is not far away.